John D. MacDonald
Betrayed
It was an Indian summer afternoon in mid-October. Sunday afternoon. Francie had gone back to the lab, five miles from the lakeside cabin, but Cudahy, the Administrator, had shooed her out, saying that he was committing enough perjury on the civil-service hours-of-work reports without having her work Sundays, too.
And so Francie Aintrell had climbed back into her ten-year-old sedan and come rattlety-bang over the potholed highways back to the small cabin. She sat on the miniature porch, her back against a wooden upright, fingers laced around one blue-jeaned knee.
Work, she had learned, was one of the anesthetics. Work and time. They all talked about time and what it would do for you. The healing wonder of time. As though each second could be another tiny layer of insulation between you and Bob. And one day, when enough seconds and minutes and years had gone by, you could look in your mirror and see a face old enough to be the mother of Bob, and his face would remain young and unchanged in memory. But she could look in the wavery mirror in the little camp and touch her cheeks with her finger tips, touch the face that he had loved, see the blue eyes he had loved, the black hair. And, thinking of him, her face would become like one of those putty faces children play with. Something would take it and twist it out of shape, force it to despairing tears.
No, work was better. And then she could forget the classic shape of the little tragedy. West Point, post World War II class. Second Lieutenant Robert Aintrell. One of the expendable ones. And expended, of course, near a reservoir no one had ever heard of before. KIA. A lot of them from that class became KIA on the records.
When he had been sent to Korea she had gone from the West Coast back to the Pentagon and applied for reinstatement. Clerk-stenographer. CAF 6. Assigned to the District Control Section of the Industrial Service Branch of the Office of the Chief of Ordnance. “Mrs. Aintrell. Yes, her husband is in Korea. Regular Army. Tough on the kids, isn’t it, Colonel?”
And all the tired lyrics of the radio songs take on new meanings. As though written for you alone.
They send you a wire and you open it, and the whole world makes a convulsive twist and lands in a new pattern. It can’t happen to you. And to Bob. But it has.
So, after the first hurt, so sharp and wild that it was like a kind of insanity, Francie applied for work outside of Washington, because they had been together in Washington, and that made it a place to escape from.
Everyone had been sweet. Too sweet. Keeping her on the edge of tears. And then there had been the investigation. Very detailed. Very thorough. “Yes, Mrs. Aintrell is a loyal citizen. Class A security risk.”
Promotion to CAF 7. “Report to Mr. Cudahy, please. Vanders, New York. Yes, that’s in the Adirondacks. Near Lake Arthur. Sorry, the only name we have for that organization is Unit 30.”
And three miles from Vanders, five miles from the lake, she had found a new gravel road, a shining wire fence at the end of it, a guard post, a cinder-block building, a power cable marching over the hills on towers, ending at the lab.
She had reported to Cudahy, a fat little mild-eyed man. She could not tell, but she thought he approved of her. “Mrs. Aintrell, you have been approved by Security. There is no need, is there, to tell you not to discuss what we are doing here?”
“No, sir.”
“We are concerned with electronics, with radar. This is a research organization. The terminology will give you difficulty at first. If we accomplish our mission here, Mrs. Aintrell, we will be able to design a nose fuse for interceptor rockets which will make any air attack on this continent... too expensive to contemplate.”
At that, Cudahy hitched in his chair and turned so that he could glance over his shoulder at an enlarged photograph of an illustration Francie remembered seeing in a magazine. It showed the fat, red bloom of the atom god towering over the skyline of Manhattan.
Cudahy turned back and smiled. “That is the threat that goads us on. Now come meet the staff.”
Most of them were young. The names and faces were a blur. Francie didn’t mind. She knew that she would straighten them out soon enough. Ten scientists and engineers. About fifteen technicians. And then the guards and housekeeping personnel. The bachelor staff lived behind the wire. The married staff rented cabins in the vicinity. Cudahy’s administrative assistant was a tall, youngish man with deep-set, quiet eyes, a relaxed manner, a hint of stubbornness in the set of the jaw. His name was Clinton Reese.
After they were introduced, Cudahy said, “I believe Clint has found a place for you.”
“Next best thing to a cave, Mrs. Aintrell,” Clint had said. “But you have lovely neighbors. Mostly bears. You have a car?”
“No, I haven’t,” she replied. His casual banter seemed oddly out of focus when she looked beyond his shoulder and saw that picture on Cudahy’s office wall.
“I’ll take you to the local car mart and we’ll get you one, then.”
Cudahy said, “Thanks, Clint. Show her where she’ll work and give her a run-through on the duties, then take her out to that place you rented... We’ll expect you at nine tomorrow morning, Mrs. Aintrell.”
Clint took her to her desk. He said, “Those crazy people you met are scientists and engineers. They work in teams, attempting different avenues of approach to the same problem. Left to their own devices, they’d keep notes on the backs of match folders. Because even scientists sometimes drop dead, we have to keep progress reports up to date in case somebody else has to take over. There are three teams. You’ll take notes, transcribe them, and keep the program files. Tomorrow I’ll explain the care of madmen. Ready to go?”
They stopped in Vanders and picked up her luggage from the combination general store and bus depot. Clint loaded it into the back of his late-model sedan. He chattered amiably all the way out to the road that bordered the north shore of Lake Arthur. He pulled off into a small clearing just off the road and said, “We’ll leave the stuff here in case it turns out to be a little too primitive.”
The trail leading down the wooded slope toward the lake shore was hard-packed. At the steepest point there was a rustic handrail. When Francie first saw the small cabin, the deep blue of the lake beyond it, her heart seemed to turn over. Bob had talked of just such a place. A porch overlooking the lake. A small wooden dock. And the perfect stillness of the woods in mid-September.
The interior was small. One fair-sized room with a wide built-in bunk. A gray stone fireplace. A tiny kitchen and bath.
Clint Reese said, in the manner of a guide, “You will note that this little nest has modern conveniences. Running water, latest model lanterns for lights. Refrigerator, stove, heater, and hot-water heater all run on bottled gas. We never get more than eight feet of snow, so I’m told, and you’ll have to have a car. The unscrupulous landlord wants forty a month. Like?”
She turned toward him, smiling. “Like very much.”
“Now I’ll claw my way up your hill and bring down your bags. You check the utensils and supplies. I laid in some food, on the gamble that you’d like it here.”
He came down with the bags, making a mock show of exhaustion. He explained the intricacies of the lanterns and the heaters, then said that he’d pick her up in the morning at eight-fifteen.
“You’ve been very kind,” she said.
“Dogs and children go wild about me. See you tomorrow.”
After he had disappeared around the bend of the trail she stood frowning. He was her immediate superior, and he had acted totally unlike any previous superior in the Civil Service hierarchy. Usually they were most reserved, most cautious. He seemed entirely too blithe and carefree to be able to do an administrative job of the type this Unit 30 apparently demanded. He was a puzzle, and she wondered if it could be her recent loss that made his joking manner slightly irritating.